Symbiosis Gathering brings together eccentric lineup and tribal flavor to five-day waterfront affair

By Joseph Giuliano

What to make of this year’s annual Symbiosis Gathering? Well, anything you wanted to make of it, actually.

The five-day affair, held Sept. 19-23 at Woodward Reservoir about 90 minutes from San Francisco, was part music festival, part camping excursion, part yoga retreat, part sprawling art exhibition, part celebration of back-to-basics culture and part consciousness-raising seminar.

• ||| Photos by Zimo Huang [more after the jump]

It was staged by Bay Area producers Symbiosis Events, which this year brought Los Angeles-based group The Do Lab (perpetrators of strangeness every year at Coachella as well as the people behind the Lightning in a Bottle Festival) to collaborate.

So the eccentric musical lineup – which featured performance from dream-popper Active Child, folkies He’s My Brother She’s My Sister, genre-spanning festival favorite Pumpkin and futuristic trap king RL Grime – was only part of the show.

Although the set times were erratic and the festival layout was labyrinthine enough to cause confusion, fans enjoyed sets from mind-blowing performance outfit Sorne, spoken word poet/alternative hip-hop artist Saul Williams, jamtronica pioneers Sound Tribe Sector 9, producer and psychedelic dub artist OTT, multi-instrumentalist/beat boxer/festival circuit regular Lynx and the arresting acrobatics of the Edwardian Ball Roadshow.

And at what other festival can you swim in close proximity to the stages? The festival, held near Oakdale, earned the nickname Swimbiosis because of its beautiful swimmable waters – if the music or the yoga or the many workshops or the crowd’s weird fashion sense stressed you out, there was plenty of time to skinny-dip nearby, and many attendees did.